February 22, 2008

Part II: Privacy and The (Watching) Eyes...

Part II: Privacy &
Eyes Looking In:

Starting with the eye as the definition of self, artistically and symbolically in Part I, Eyes Looking Out, I am now in Part II looking
at the issue of technology and privacy and wondering how this will
alter our very sense of self, our soul and our way of seeing our
identities and our world.

For our children, things will be and are dramatically, radically different, far more different than they already are, tech wise. Profound changes are altering us in ways that are complex and scary and unfathomable. Like the kohl used for protection around eyes long ago and today (this kohl-lined eye at right is from an Egyptian sarcophagus in the Met), what firewalls or metaphorical kohl and protections will we have? What will we give up for convenience, for safety, for security and what are the long-term implications?

Advertisers want to know what our eyes pays attention to so
measurement of viewers and these stats are important. How is your
attention tracked? Who is paying attention to what you are paying
attention to? Who is watching you? I've bought Google stock as I
believe they are ahead of the game in online advertising and profiting
from this. Other businesses are coming online to measure and collect information
as online advertising is slated to take off in astronomical numbers.
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang sees the
$45 billion online advertising market projected to grow $75 billion in
2010. The government has privatized and outsourced data mining and
collection. Googlers say old media isn't dead, it just has to be Google-ized. I've been paying attention to the Microsoft/Yahoo merger deal and mobile trends. iPhone has quickly captured a third of the global market and Apple
has an exclusive deal with AT&T for the phones - at least in the
U.S. AT&T can monitor all cell phone data and has done this and is wanting immunity for protection against the illegalities of this.

RFID (radio frequency ID) technology has huge implications for us. It is already used in chips implanted in dogs for IDs. Think if they were in our cellphones. Shoot, maybe they are already. From 1955 to 2005, cumulative sales of radio tags totaled 2.4 billion; last year alone, 2.24 billion tags were sold worldwide. In 2003 Wal-Mart started using RFID and the government is placing RIFD tags in passports starting this year.RealID is part of the majority of the nation's plans to identify us beyond social security numbers in all new state drivers licenses. New Mexico is one state complying with the new laws to identify everyone through driver's licenses in implementing RealID starting this year. I think only five states are not.

Digging deep in following my interest in media (media theorist Marshall McLuhan said decades ago "The Medium is the Message" and he saw media as extensions of man and this was decades before the new media technology evolved. Nicholas Carr writes on how
tools become parts of us - extensions of our bodies (I think smart
phones, mobile phones and how cell phones are "worn" like a new
appendage and are our new tools of operation). Well, specifically
Carr wrote about how tools are extensions of the bodies of monkeys. He
cites a new study by a team of Italian researchers that suggest the minds of primates conceive tools as body parts.
He has this quote: "An archeologist at University College London says
the study "fairly clearly show that monkey tool use involves the incorporation of tools into the body schema, literally as extensions of the body."
But Carr concludes that unlike monkeys, we know the difference between
our body and the tech tool, at once embracing it and keeping it at
arm's length. I don't know. I think it becomes ubiquitous and we
embrace these tech conveniences blindly without knowing how they are
altering us.

Here's where Marshall McLuhan's idea of media as extensions of man
becomes highly prescient in terms of how we are using today's tech
tools. I think of this in terms of the iPhone that I played with
recently in the Apple Store that can posit my location or give me
information I need to find, or of my Treo that keeps my notes and
numbers and information so I don't clutter my memory. The question I
think of in regards to this is how are these tools changing the way we think? How we live? How are they changing us?

Creepy, Scary: How are these tools changing us as they are used by others? I received an email, deemed creepy by the sender, about this site -- Global Incident Map -- a display of terror and other suspicious events occuring around the world and updated continuously. Really, go check out that link and see if you are newfangledly weirded out.*
When you know that satellites can see everything, zoom in (Google Maps)
and how information can be mashed together and compounded, how GPS can
track geographic location and is embedded in cars and phones then now,
you must realize that we, you and I, arein a surveillance society. 2007 Privacy Rankings categorize the U.S. is an "endemic surveillance society" and in terms of statutory protections and privacy enforcement, the U.S. is the worst ranking country in the democratic world. Biometric data is being collected in our country: Iris, Face and Fingerprint Scans are being databased by FBI.

Ramifications of the Patriot Act in this data all-knowing world? Well, technology
and world conditions and security and protection and privacy and data
mining -- all of these events are so far ahead of legalities that it is
confusing to understand all of the implications. Well, I got into these issues somewhat in an earlier ramble this Fall on Google and Privacy.
But I've kept on mulling implications. As with the invention of the
printing press, long-term implications are harder to understand than
short-term changes in technology.

Before Super Tuesday, as I read an article online at the Washington
Post, two ads popped up as I clicked on a political story about
candidates in the presidential primaries. I clicked on to two of them:
1) an Anti-John McCain site parading as a "John McCain for President 2008" maintained by a dissatisfied Arizona constituent. 2) An ad for Hilllary Clinton wristbands. They were probably targeted to me via my ISP address as I enter
Washington Post allows which tailored advertising to me with my state
voting on Super Tuesday. That is a targeted ad not by zip code, but by ISP. WaPo has me registered as a female. No
ads from Republicans on the page. I wouldn't mind if advertising were
so ubiquitous that things I'm interested in were filtered from things I
could care less about. Amazon gives me recommendations based on my
interest. That works.

Institutionalized Spying on Americans by Stephen Lendman is an article I came across and he writes about and reviews two
police state tools (among many in use) in America. One is new,
undiscussed and largely unknown to the public. Gave me chills like reading Robert Ludlum does only this isn't spy fiction.

Surveillance technologies will continue to gain in capability -- and become more intrusive. Anyone can take a picture/video most anywhere in public and post it online like on YouTube or a blog. SURVEILLANCE -- NO FEDERAL RULES GOVERNING PUBLIC VIDEOS...was another article
headline that caught my eye as I'm aware the U.K. has public cameras
everywhere and someone's eyes are watching all. This is an example of
how technologies and their implementations move way ahead of laws to
contain and manage them. From that article: Supreme Court rulings suggest
that individual freedoms are not violated by the placement of
surveillance cameras, without a warrant, in public spaces. Unless audio
recordings are paired with your image, it's unlikely that your privacy
has been violated. As an increasingly sophisticated surveillance
blanket covers more of the United States, we need federal laws to
preserve an individual's right to privacy....

On the issue of privacy and data and legislation to manage
this and civil liberties, I followed the issue regarding the Protect
America Act and how the House let the act expire even though the Senate
had passed an update/extension that included retroactive immunity for
the telecoms. Amanda Carpenter of Townhall says
the Dems oppose telecom immunity because they're beholden to trial
lawyers "suing those phone companies." She continues, "Court records
and campaign contribution data reveal that 66 trial lawyers
representing plaintiffs in lawsuits against these phone companies
donated at least $1.5 million to Democrats, including 44 current
Democratic senators."

Do the nation's intelligence-gathering agencies need warrants --
from a secret court -- to snoop on suspected terrorists via
telecommunication facilities within the United States? The warrantless
spying has already occurred in a program the Bush administration
authorized following the Sept. 11 attacks. The president, as chief
commander, maintains the Constitution grants him such powers
notwithstanding the Fourth Amendment. After the law's expiration, the
government will retain substantial surveillance capability, and
classified orders allowing the monitoring of international telephone
calls, e-mail and other communications under the law are valid for a
year, so they will not expire before August so it is really about
telecom immunity. But it is more than that. It is our struggle to
find a balance between what we need as a society and a struggle to
understand these things. The eavesdropping authorizations under the law
continue for a year. Crucial decisions about civil liberties in an age
of terror shouldn't be driven by fear.

But we do live in an age of terror and fear, a perpetual
state of war with the enemy we've been primed against, a nebulous
enemy that we are constantly reminded is ready to harm us at anytime. We don't have those terror alert levels flashing on our tv screens anymore, notice that? Marshall McLuhan stressed the importance of awareness of a
medium's cognitive effects. He argues that, if we are not vigilant to
the effects of media's influence, the global village has the potential
to become a place where totalitarianism and terror rule. McLuhan, in
writing on media, argued that technology itself has no moral bent but
it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual, and by extension, a
society's self-conception. When a campus shooting happened, our
president's televised comments were brief on that issue, and were used
as an introduction to equate this with larger fears of enemies, fear
and terror.

Keith Olberman went on
when these debates were raging. He has a way with words and I quote him
because he captures the puzzles, riddles and enigmas that we struggle
to understand behind much of the media maniuplation for soundbites: "In
a presidency of hypocrisy — an
administration of exploitation — a labyrinth of leadership — in which
every vital fact is a puzzle inside a riddle wrapped in an enigma
hidden under a claim of executive privilege (the president is)... demanding an ex
post facto law which would clear the phone giants from responsibility
for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with (the president's)
illegal and unjustified spying on Americans, under the flimsy guise of
looking for any terrorists..." Is it really that simple, or is technology and media and data mining ahead of our ability to really understand future and present needs and can we be responsible to dig deep and understand this in a transparent debate?

Facebook users can't delete information
and have concerns over the network’s efforts to profit from the private
information they volunteer to the site. You, the digital you, and your
networks, and your data can't be contained or erased.

We're moving to a state where privacy and legal protections of the
individual need to be subjugated to the needs of national security since we are
in a Long War that might last forever against terror, with our population growing and
borders porous and conflicts continuing and resource pressures growing.

If you want more on data issues, go read James Bamford's books to unravel the labyrinth of these developments via the government.

What led me to write this post now, though, was the latest script or cookie I came across that newfangedly weirded* me out.

I use Firefox with the NoScript add-on, which allows me to block
cookies by site -- cookies that track my online use or whatever. This week a new script popped up as
I checked my MotherPie site. If it is popping up for me, it is for
you, too. But I bet most of my readers don't have NoScript so they
wouldn't be aware this cookie has been placed surreptitiously. This site's company, Six Apart, has added a cookie to all it's Typepad blogs (including mine, without my permission) from a company called Quantcast to track visitors and stats
to measure traffic and such. When I tried to research information
about this, the best info came from the privacy link to Quantcast's
privacy policies in the information on this subject that Typepad
provides to its customers. It was really creepy and makes me want
to stop blogging. Now at first, it doesn't sound spooky. Typepad
writes this about the company whom they call "a trusted partner", which
seems fairly innocuous:

Quantcast is a trusted partner of Six Apart. They are building an
"Open Internet Ratings Service" to provide a resource for website
publishers like TypePad bloggers to understand more about their
visitors, and for advertisers to understand advertising opportunities
with those publishers.

Does Quantcast collect any personal information about my readers?

No. Quantcast's service is based on purely anonymous data, and the
Quantcast service does not collect any personal information about you
or your readers.

I've asked my blogging service to clarify the additional privacy information from Quantcast, that I followed through the link to Quantcast's privacy policies. Look at what Quantcast lists as an "exclusion" from its privacy policies and YOU, TOO, WILL BE NEWFANGEDLY WEIRDED OUT*:

"This Privacy Policy shall not apply to any unsolicited information (such as comments and feedback) you provide to Quantcast through the Site and/or that you post to any public areas of the Site, such as comments and discussion boards (collectively, "Unsolicited Information"). All
such Unsolicited Information shall be deemed to be non-confidential and
Quantcast shall be free to reproduce, use, disclose, and distribute
such Unsolicited Information to others without limitation or attribution. You should be aware that if you voluntarily disclose Unsolicited Information online, that Unsolicited Information can be collected and used by others.
For example, if you post your email address in comments sections or
online forums, you may receive unsolicited messages from others.
Quantcast has no control over the use of Personal Data that you
voluntarily post in public forums."

note: bolding is my own editorial addition

Now Typepad also says your email is not posted for public and I use
that information to privately email people so this sounds like it is
limited, but think if you write anything personal then that is noted.
And everything I post is and can be used and tracked as well as
links to sites I visit and where my audience comes from prior to
reading here, and where they go afterwards. Who is using this
information, and for what reasons? Quantcast says this about the company: "QuantCast is a team of web analytics experts who want to make accurate and insightful internet audience information as widely available as possible."

Well, enough about this long post on eyes and privacy. Last time, though, I wrote about Google's new efforts with blog commenters, which led me to first write about privacy, my readers rallied and Google changed its format soon after. Technology
is evolving so fast and it provides convenience and access but we are
giving up something, too, in the process: privacy. I find this all interesting, creepy, futuristic, of concern and confounding. My Eyes -- my own collection of eyes on Flickr has more on eyes - but nothing on privacy. I focus on What My Eye Sees -- another of my themed sets with my photos.
But I don't have an eye to the future, really. So who knows what all
this means. Probably an end of anonymity and a complete nakedness
which might mean, for our future, a loss of the private self. Spooky.

Who knows. Maybe grandchildren will be tagged at birth with RIFD. We do it to dogs. Why not.

*definition of newfangledly weirded out: go figure and try to define these things yourself. New words to describe odd new shift-changing things.

Update: Thanks to Typepad for responding so quickly in the comment section to the issue of their data measurement tools. Also, in the news today,
Publishing company Reed Elsevier, owner of the LexisNexis Group, is seeking to acquire commercial data broker ChoicePoint
in a $4.1 billion cash deal that would create a global
information-gathering powerhouse that would collect and analyze
billions of records about who people are, where they live and with
whom, and what they own.

This is a great post looking at the implications of technology on privacy. I work for Six Apart (the makers of TypePad), and I do want to clarify one point you made about the Quantcast privacy policy, and give you a bit of background about why we are working with them.

We work with Quantcast - as do thousands of other online publishers - as a neutral third party provider of online analytics. They are building an "Open Internet Ratings Service" to help publishers understand more about their visitors. But they do not collect any personal information about you or your readers. The exclusion you quote from their privacy policy is only related to any content that visitors to their own site (Quantcast.com) submit on their blog (blog.quantcast.com) or any other forums they develop on their site. That section does not pertain to information you post to your blog on TypePad, or any comments that your readers post to your blog on TypePad.

We are working with Quantcast on ways that we can bring their analytics tools to TypePad users as an enhancement to our existing stats system. Understanding visitor behavior and having better stats is one of our top feature requests for TypePad, and that's why we're working closely with Quantcast to help us deliver enhancements to that feature.

We take your privacy very seriously, and TypePad gives you options to protect your identity and even protect your content from public view. We obviously don't want this to stop you from blogging! Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions! My email address is sippey@sixapart.com.

Michael... just shows you Typepad is a great blogging company that you would respond so quickly to this blog post with valuable information. I didn't get such a response through my query internally in the help section so I'm glad to see these questions answered here.